AVETRANA – ARCH EXERCISE I
Commissioned project.
REALISED
Program: Complete renovation of a two-family house, including garden design.
Total floor area: 350 sqm.
Budget: € 375.000.
Client: private.
Location: Avetrana (Taranto), Italy.
Design and realisation: 2009-2013.
This two-family house presents a traditional local scheme of ‘row house’; introvert on the street and open on the back garden. The central rooms, living and dining areas, suffered great lack of light, due to their distance from the two facades. All rooms on the ground floor present vaulted masonry ceilings, very valuable for their architecture and space effect.
The scheme imposes the preservation of the enfilade of vaulted spaces, yet it urges a strategy to avoid the box in box effect and extend multiple
internal flows and views. In order to achieve this effect of openness and space interconnection, we used the ‘arch’ archetype and applied it in a playful unconventional way. We opened several arches, different in size, either as ‘internal windows’ or to merge entire rooms into each other. The final effect contributes to lighten the masonry structure, offering many interconnected perspectives that ultimately make the spaces breath, lightened by lots of natural light. The masonry becomes lighter, like paper, cut by generous voids.
We reduced the palette of materials to very few ones: masonry and stucco for the walls; ‘coccio pesto’ for the floors, a local mix of hydraulic mortar and terracotta grit, poured on site; travertine for the other surfaces. Travertine is applied either inits natural state, or treated with a transparent resin, capable to preserve the visual irregularity of the stone. The final effect wills to recreate a sort of ‘rustic , thrifty, somehow austere’ atmosphere, achieved by using innovative applications for traditional materials.
AVETRANA – STUDIO M
Conversion of the basement of a villa into an independent studio apartment.
Commissioned project.
Client: private.
Location: Avetrana (TA), Italy.
Year: 2012.
Status: realised
BALEN – HOUSE G
Commissioned project.
REALISED
Renovation and extension of single family house.
Client: private
Total floor area: 296 sqm.
Budget: € 240.000.
Location: Balen, Belgium.
Design and realisation: 2010-2013.
The house in Balen is a reconstruction and extension project of an existing small house, too little for its growing family.
The concept is based on a duplication of the volume with an amputated portion of pinched roof in order to offer additional light to the centre of the house, otherwise too dark. The lifted roof gives a generous spatial quality to the rooms located under this roof.
NORRKÖPING – PARADISE REGAINED
International urban planning competition.
Masterplan.
Program:
Total planning area:
Location: Norrköpping, Sweden.
Design: 2011.
MOL – HOUSE B
Commissioned project.
REALISED
Single family villa.
Client: private.
Total floor area: 328 sqm.
Budget: € 360.000.
Location: Mol, Belgium.
Design and realisation: 2008-2011.
This single family house is designed with the simple gesture of separating living and sleeping functions in two stacked volumes that create an L-shape. This configuration optimizes the sun orientation, yet opens the house to the internal private garden (not yet realized), while closing it on the street. The building is surrounded by a beautiful forest. For this reason, the used materials range from traditional local brick to afrormosia wood, both giving the house a warm cosy appearance.
DELHI – VASTU ACME
International architecture competition.
Mixed use.
Data: 60.000 sqm hotel, office, apartments, commercial, leisure, services.
Location: Delhi, India.
Year: 2010.
The overall composition is based on the distribution of eight slabs on the site. They are optimized in height and depth in order to host efficiently the main functions required by the master plan: housing, offices and hotel. While offering best views and orientation to all functions, we optimize their total floor ratio.
We compact the additional program into a platform that reconnects the whole structure in a rich system, capable to disclose an exciting sequence of “special spaces”.
The sustainability strategy is founded on the use of the urban floor and the elevated terrace as “public landscapes”. Covered with local species, the terrace will reduce CO2 production. A big water basin that collects rain water on the gallery roof will provide natural refreshment for the hotel rooms.
The orientation of the buildings, together with the system of deep loggias and louvres, will optimize the natural lighting of the interiors. The housing green balconies will filter the air and the light, maximizing the environmental quality of the dwellings.
UTRECHT – VARIATION CODE
EUROPAN 10 international urban planning competition
Masterplan for the mixed use redevelopment of Kanaleniland in Utrecht.
Program: Residential area with 250 housing units, divided into 4 low rise and 2 high rise typologies; design of central park, underground parking, retail and public space.
Location: Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Design: 2009.
VIENNA – HEIDI & CARRIE
EUROPAN 10 international urban planning competition.
SHORTLISTED
Masterplan for the Liesing District in Vienna.
Program: 358 dwellings, combination of low rise and high rise types. Park, social and commercial activities, plan for a new train station.
Total planning area: 11 ha
Total floor area: 45.000 sqm.
Location: Vienna, Austria.
Design: 2009.
The realities that surround the project site become the base for our study. Its heterogeneous border conditions are astonishing and surreal: the agricultural allotments, their proximity to the centre and to Shönbrunn, a cemetery. We accept to compromise with the allotments and rather pursue their qualities to the extreme, in order to re-invent a unique lifestyle fitting the site. In this sense, we want to pursue the extreme agricultural condition by creating a striking contrast with its “shape and texture”.
Therefore we create a line of high rise elements, very slender and dynamic. The combination of two different densities becomes the key concept for the rediscovery of a new lifestyle and urban landscape. We base the whole master-plan on the collaboration of three main characters: the low rise area, the high rise and the central park. This last one becomes a mediator, an “urban event” which will transform Meidling-Liesing into a unique example for the coexistence of different lifestyles in the core of the capital city.
AMSTERDAM – COITIO
International urban planning competition.
Masterplan, mixed use.
Program: Private and subsidized housing with dwelling types from 45 sqm to 210 sqm. Retail, ateliers, services. Waterfront landscape design.
Total floor area: 33.012 sqm.
Location: Amsterdam Buiksloterham, The Netherlands.
Design: 2007.
The north of Amsterdam is currently living a rejuvenation through a city planning strategy, in which the role of this portion of the city is transformed and improved for the coming future. After a long history of urban planning that saw the northern portion of Amsterdam partially excluded from its growth, the north will now see the flourishing of new developments for contemporary living districts, cultural centers, working complexes, entertainment and commercial facilities, suitable for a new dynamic Dutch generation.
In this context, the area of Buiksloterham plays a very important role, because of its predominant and high quality location; at the end of the Johan van Hasseltkanaal, right open on the Zijkanaal, the plot embraces the water, gaining an incredible urban connotation , still very naturalistic and traditional of the Dutch environment. For these reasons, in order to fulfill at once the local and urban ambition of the site, we decided to pursue a visionary image of the area through the definition of a master plan, capable to define, through the use of a clever matrix of urban elements, a new striking and unique identity for the neighborhood.
The three project areas collaborate to define a master plan, a new city within the city, in which the composition of micro environments offers changing atmospheres, multiple functional combinations, different building scale relationships and, at the same time, a unique, strong, visionary identity; a powerful sensitive tool to pursue the new pioneering role of the north.
While proposing a master plan for the area defined as “buildable” in this contest, we suggest the extension of the strategy to the two additional areas along the Johan van Hasseltkanaal, and the waterfront on the Zijkanaal. We want to demonstrate the validity of the strategy as self supporting for the three areas, as the city will choose to develop them. The master plan allows a collaboration of the sites searching for a flexible, still unique vision for the whole area. At the same time, the strategy offers autonomy to the three areas, making the intervention on the project site, still possible with no dependency on the others, because based on an urban, rather than architectural concept.
The main elements featuring the master plan are the parietal buildings, which constitute some sort of “filmic frame” for the district, and the inner low density “podium”.
The frame foresees the combination of different housing types, for different market targets. In light of this, the huge “portal building” on the south corner of the plot and its low rise development in front of the Zijkanaal, will perform the role of welcoming entrance to the district from the quay and will host types combining working and living with apartments for the free market.
The building on the Papaverweeg will host subsidized apartments in a “gallery slab”, open on the ground floor on pilotis in order to connect directly the district to the upper urban condition.
We generate our urban and architectural proposal by assuming the differences the program, typological, functional and above all social.
By stating and accepting the social combination, we accept a consequent architectural mixture, aiming to gain through this fusion quality, innovation, uniqueness and an exceptional identity.
阿姆斯特丹 – COITIO | AMSTERDAM – COITIO
城市设计与景观设计
33.000 平方米复合功能总体规划: 不同形式的私有与公共住宅 面积45平方米至210平方米不等
零售, 工作室, 服务，滨水景观设计
国际城市设计竞赛
阿姆斯特丹 荷兰 2007
此次总体设计的主要元素就是周边的建筑， 他们形成了这个地块的边界， 暗示了中心地区的低密度特性。这些边界建筑考虑到不同的市场需求提供了不同的住宅类型。在这样的背景下， 地块南角的“门户建筑”以及Zirkannal运河边低层建筑将构成该地区的面向港口方向的入口， 同时将容纳面向自由市场的工作-生活公寓组团。位于Papaverweg街上的建筑将容纳一个画廊般的公用住宅。 建筑底层通过架空来实现本地块与周边环境的联系。
我们希望我们的城市与建筑设计提案能够包容不同项目，样式以及功能，使之成为促进社会融合的有效工具。